Chomping and Chewing

Books used to be delicate morsels of butter chicken that I chewed away relishing every red tinge of color on the meat. Nowadays, it is more like gulping down bucketloads of Lays so that I can get to the next packet faster. I don’t know how this transition came about, because if it had been a conscious decision, I wouldn’t have gone down this way. I assimilate far far less from an ‘usual’ book that I used to say, three years ago. A week after I’ve read the book, I’ve forgotten pretty much all the names in it, and a month after that, the specific details of the plot. Even if it is an excellently crafted creation, my hazy reading habits don’t permit me to recall it later. It’s becoming worse nowadays and I can see no end in sight, because I’ve gone from a book a week to a book every two days or so. I’m assimililating words by the millions. Do you know that an average novel contains 100,000 words? Do you know that a single chapter of Seven (which takes me about a week to write, and a month to polish) has an average of 10,000 words? I seem to be dealing in huge numbers these days, with quality a forgotten quotient.

I don’t like this, but a change will be hard, since I don’t know if I really want to.